Kind: captions
Language: en
(gentle music)
- As long as I have breath,
I'm able to, inhale and
exhale, I'm hopeful.
There are certain assumptions that we have
that our ins and outs, our
inhalations and our exhalations,
just come to us and the past
year has proven otherwise.
COVID has impacted so many with illness
and killed over 600,000
just in this country alone.
That COVID insidiously
impacts one's lungs,
creates these sticky-surfaced,
clogged, mucus-filled organs that,
betray us.
And so COVID has given us reasons
to appreciate each breath.
I can remember in the early days of COVID,
after hearing about the
pathology of the disease,
of mucus suffocating people,
that each morning when I would wake up,
I'd take the deepest breath possible
just to make sure that I could.
And climate change creating
chronic breathing conditions,
lung disease, which often
visits people of color,
children of color much greater
than it does white children.
That it's such a big
concept, climate change,
the earth warming.
As far away as it seems,
it's our next breath.
Part of the solution
ultimately is more green,
to have more tree canopies that breathe,
one of the only ways for
me to regain that breath
is to come out in wildness
where there's water,
where there are woods.
We can do that as
birders, as birdwatchers,
whatever hue we are, to
understand these connections.
Looking skyward to birds
doesn't mean that you can't
look outward to better.
And that's why places
like this are so important
because I come out here and I think,
of birds carrying me beyond
everything that was bad,
at least for a while.
I hear a birdsong, this
northern mockingbird
that just in this aria around us,
and a red-bellied woodpecker and I smile,
and when I smile, the
breath comes more easily.
And that's what I get
in these wild spaces.
The unlimited lung capacity,
the unlimited me capacity.
Just to be.
(gentle music)